This article considers the temporality of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) for what it suggests about the demands of authorship and copyright in the postcolonial present. By close reading the novel alongside some salient commentaries and intertexts, we attend to the interval between the postcolonial novel and its early modern predecessor Robinson Crusoe (1719), and suggest how the works could be so reread as to displace the limits of proprietary authorship.