One way to cut vim from mouse awareness seems to be commenting out the configuration about the mouse.
In /usr/share/vim/vim80/defaults.vim I commented out the mouse specific detection as in:
" In many terminal emulators the mouse works just fine. By enabling it you
" can position the cursor, Visually select and scroll with the mouse.
"if has('mouse')
" set mouse=r
"endif
(in those vim configuration files, " is initiating a comment).
The change has allowed us to copy and paste again without any problems.
I do agree with the comments this is not the ideal solution. At the time, and due to specifics either of a version of the package or of the configuration of the servers where I used to work, it was the only one that worked, and should only be used as a last resort.