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The clipboard is a typical UI feature, used by end users. In ASP.NET, the target UI is the browser, obviously, and there's no way to code anything in the browser (client-side) with C#, which runs on the server when the page is processed. Thus, there's no purpose in copying things to the clipboard on the server. There's no user to pick it later! And it would be dangerous to rely on such a mechanism to pass data around, as it's shared by the whole operating system, thus multiple Web application may overwrite each other's data, etc.
On the other hand, if you're looking at copying to the clipboard on the client-side (the browser), you need to do so with JavaScript. However, there's no homogenous, cross-browser, cross-platform, standard way of doing that. In Windows AND IE you can use the window.clipboardData object, as explained at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/clipboarddata.asp. In Mozilla, it requires a "little" more work, as explained at http://www.krikkit.net/howto_javascript_copy_clipboard.html.
This was first published in September 2003