Just ran into this yesterday, so here is your annual reminder. If you are responsible for releasing maven artifacts, you should update your pom.xml files right now to up the copyright date to 2017 in the license headers. Otherwise, the release plugin stuff will fail in the middle and you'll have to back out what you did up until that point, and then update your poms, and then try to release again. Avoid that pain now :) and update your pom license headers now.