I have found the answer to my own question (in case others would like to know).  The code can be altered as follows to get the desired behavior:
optimizerCopy = optim.SGD( netCopy.parameters(), lr=0.1, momentum=0.0 )
optimizerCopy.zero_grad()
for paramName, paramValue, in net.named_parameters():
  for netCopyName, netCopyValue, in netCopy.named_parameters():
    if paramName == netCopyName:
      netCopyValue.grad = paramValue.grad.clone()