The lowdown from the Reddit site:
FAQ
What is the intent of SOPA/PROTECT IP?
The stated intent of the bills is to provide tools for law enforcement and copyright holders to protect their intellectual property rights.
What’s wrong with protecting copyrights?
Nothing! The devil, as they say, is in the details. PROTECT IP and SOPA will cause too much collateral damage, have a high potential for abuse, and won't even be that effective at stopping the crimes they target. Read alienth's examination of where these bills fail.
I'm not in the U.S. Why does this affect me?
Many of the sites that you may use (e.g. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.) are all affected by this law and will be required to hide offending domains from you.
If a non-U.S. site is blocked in the U.S., the site could suffer financially or even be bankrupted by the loss of U.S. traffic and revenue.
Are non-US sites necessarily going to die with the lack of US traffic? Maybe not. One might even say probably not.
However, under SOPA and PIPA sites could be tried in America - based on random information - perfect strangers could, say, theoretically dislike something you said on a hot button issue - gay marriage, abortion, breathing correctly - and then claim issues of IP and then you're attempting to protect your site from American rules built in by people that don't understand the Internet.
Indeed, from CIRA:
If a Canadian website is found to infringe on copyright, U.S. search engines may be required to stop indexing the site in their results. If the site is hosted by an American ISP, it could be shut down. A Canadian online business could find itself without a system to collect payments if a U.S. online payment provider is required to not do business with them.
OR: The Oatmeal explains it all with a gif:
To find out more about the Canadian side of things, Michael Geist has ongoing coverage of the issues.
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