KISS Technology is an entertainment technology

Entertainment technology

Entertainment technology is the discipline of using manufactured or created components to enhance or make possible any sort of entertainment experience. Because entertainment categories are so broad, and because entertainment models the world in many ways, the types of implemented technology are...

 company based in the Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

. It was acquired by Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...

 on July 22, 2005.

In January 2004 the open-source MPlayer

MPlayer

MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...

 project accused the then Danish DVD player manufacturer, KISS Technology, of marketing DVD players with firmware

Firmware

In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...

 that included parts of MPlayer's GPL License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

d code. The implication was that KISS was violating the GPL License, since KISS did not release its firmware under the GPL license. The response from the managing director of KISS, Peter Wilmar Christensen, offered as explanation of the similarities that the MPlayer team had in fact used code stolen from KISS's firmware, while the release timeline of MPlayer and KISS firmware does not support such a statement.