The DMCA ties the two by prohibiting users of copyrighted works from circumventing technological protection measures. It could be argued that bypassing CORS applies.
CORS isn't a technological protection like a DRM and isn't design as such, it's purely a security measure, by default you don't even specify it. Browsers are free to ignore them as they wish (but with increased security risks of course).
I agree. CORS is something my user agent does to protect me. It has nothing to do with the upstream site; I could easily browse it with a user agent that doesn't support CORS and nothing would break. CORS is just some annotations that lets my user agent determine "hey these scripts might be up to something shady". It is not a copy-protection mechanism by any means.
Yeah, but my point is what was being suggested is physically impossible with CORS in place, so it does imply something about what is in the realm of possibility.