Author: immanuel.scholz[at]gmx.de
[Added to the original trac issue at 11.14am, Monday, 12th June 2006]

Rather than implementing a special case for this, I'd like to reject that request in favor of implementing other requests:

• copy and paste.
• creating of a new, empty osm data layer.
• save current layer only (will come together with the above)

This way, you could just select the area of interest, quick create an empty layer, paste it in and save the pasted. That should be the excpected behaviour in most editor applications (e.g. paint programms).