One of the cool features about the upcoming Guitar Hero World Tour is the ability to create your own tracks using the new music creation mode and upload them to the web for sharing with other players. While hardcore musicians (with actual talent) will use this to create original tunes, it's no secret what everyone wants to do the most with this feature: Cover and recreate their favorite songs as closely as possible.

That's not going to be exactly possible, alas: World Tour's music creator won't let you add vocals at all to your own tracks. Argh!

The problem is obviously one of copyright: Song lyrics are legendary in the level of legal protection they are offered, so Activision certainly had to think long and hard about how to deal with the issue of vocals on user-created tracks.

The company could have taken a number of approaches: Police uploads for infringing material and delete them on request, turn off song uploads altogether, or, obviously, get rid of the vocal track feature. Each approach presents a problem—and you can't blame Activision for not wanting to get caught up in its own YouTube v. Viacom-like war—but in many ways the ultimate decision they made feels like the least compelling solution.

And sure, there are some technical challenges to adding vocals, too: Recording them would take up a lot more space than the MIDI instrument tracks would, and there's no easy way to add text to music tracks using a video game controller. (Even a clip-in keyboard would be slow going.) But for dedicated musicians, these problems are comparably minor in the grand scheme of things.

As a solution to both the legal and technical issues, why not, as G. Schroeder suggests here, simply let track creators set a vocal range for each song, and not include lyrics on the screen or in the recording? This way at least the singer could still be part of the band (especially if he knew the song well), instead of having to go get a soda while the rest of the group jams.

Does this make for an opportunity for the Rock Band folks? Or some other rhythm game manufacturer to step into the frey? Hmmm....