OSX failing to get a url for image even though it is a supported dataflavour for the transferable

[Paul Taylor]

Customer reporting this error when trying to copy and paste an image 
from amazon, although we check the transferable object support a 
particular dataflavor, it fails when try and use that data flavour to 
get a url. Ive not seen this error before and recently moved to Java 
1.8.0_20 so I'm assuming the issues lies with Java 8 ?

java.net.MalformedURLException: no protocol: <?xml version="1.0" 
encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
<string>http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41NTPXC8EHL.jpg</string>
     <string></string>
</array>
</plist>

     at java.net.URL.<init>(URL.java:586)
     at java.net.URL.<init>(URL.java:483)
     at java.net.URL.<init>(URL.java:432)
     at 
sun.lwawt.macosx.CDataTransferer.translateBytes(CDataTransferer.java:135)
     at 
sun.awt.datatransfer.ClipboardTransferable$DataFactory.getTransferData(ClipboardTransferable.java:71)
     at 
sun.awt.datatransfer.ClipboardTransferable.getTransferData(ClipboardTransferable.java:168)

Code Extract

public static DataFlavor imageUrlFlavor =  new 
DataFlavor("application/x-java-url;class=java.net.URL");
public void getImage(Transferable trans)

if(trans.isDataFlavorSupported(FileDropTarget.imageUrlFlavor))
             {
                 imageUrl  = (URL) 
trans.getTransferData(FileDropTarget.imageUrlFlavor);
             }